Nano-scale diamond (also called nanodiamond) has a large number of excellent properties such as a high hardness and an extremely low coefficient of friction, and therefore, it has been already utilized in various fields and its development of application has been investigated as an extremely promising new material.
It is known that the nanodiamond can be synthesized by, for example, utilizing a detonation reaction of a high explosive. This synthesis method is one generally called a detonation method, in which detonation is performed with only a low explosive raw material as a carbon source, and carbon atoms decomposed and liberated from a molecule constituting the low explosive raw material by the detonation reaction are formed as diamond at high temperature and high pressure during the detonation. As for production of the nanodiamond by the detonation method, for example, see Non-Patent Literature 1.
The production of the nanodiamond by the detonation method has hitherto been performed in, for example, the East European countries such as Russia and the Ukraine, the United States of America, China, and the like. In these countries, since a military waste low explosive is inexpensively available as the low explosive raw material that is the carbon source, trinitrotoluene has been used alone, or trinitrotoluene and cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine (RDX, also called hexogen) or cyclotetramethylenetetranitramine (HMX, also called octogen) have been used together.